April 2, 2012 –Ranks of Working Poor Grow in Europe:When Melissa Dos Santos leaves her job at the end of each day, she goes home to an unlikely place: a tiny trailer in a campground 30 miles north of Paris, where scores of people who can barely make ends meet are living on a sprawling lot originally designed as a bucolic retreat for vacationers. Pictured above,Jean, 51, an electrician, lives in a shelter in the Bois de Vincennes, a park behind a parking lot in eastern Paris.

“I grew up in a house; living in a campground isn’t the same,” Ms. Dos Santos, 21, said wistfully.

Picture above, Melissa Dos Santos, 21, and Jimmy Colin, 22, live in a trailer in a campground 30 miles north of Paris.

Her dreams of a more normal life in an apartment with her boyfriend evaporated when they both took minimum-wage jobs — she in a supermarket and he as a Paris street sweeper — after months of searching fruitlessly for better-paying work. “People call us marginal,” she said. “Little by little, it’s eating us up.”Follow the complete story by clicking the link below.